140 sail all over with lots of merchandise. They have their own Mouros governor in the city, who governs and punishes them, without the king of the country knowing anything about their affairs, only a few things which the governor informs him of. Before the Portuguese discovered India, there were so many of them and so powerful and free in the city, that the gentiles did not dare walk the streets owing to their pride. Then, upon realising Portuguese intentions, they strived to expel them from India, and when they could not, they started to return little by little to their homelands, leaving India and its trade behind, thus very few have remained and they have no power. In the times when their trade and seafaring prospered, they would build keeled ships of a thousand or twelve hundred bahar tonnage. These ships were built without a single nail. The whole hull is stitched together using cord and the top work was very different to ours, without any decks. They took all kinds of merchandise on board, to take to many places. Every monsoon, ten to fifteen carracks would set sail from here for the Red Sea, Aden, and Mecca, where they would sell their cargo at a good price. They would sell some of it to merchants from Juda, who would take it to Toro in small vessels, and then from Toro to Cairo, from Cairo to Alexandria and from there to Venice, from where they would come to our country. Their merchandise consisted of a lot of pepper; ginger, and cinnamon; cardamom; cherry plums; tamarind; cassia fistula, and all sorts of precious stones; seed-pearls; musk; amber; rhubarb; agarwood; many cotton cloths and porcelains. In Juda, some of these vessels loaded copper; quicksilver; vermillion; coral; saffron; coloured velvets; rose-waters; knives; coloured camlets; gold and silver, and many other things, that they re-sold in Calicut, where they had left from in February. They arrived back between midAugust and mid-October of the same year, and they became fabulously rich by virtue of this trade.
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